Kicking off Montreal’s summer festival season is the St. Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival. It’s a big deal. I mean, it’s a huge festival, a massive undertaking coordinated by staff, dozens of volunteers, and hundreds of performers.

"It's my first Fringe For All", I say for the hundredth time Monday. I'm excitable, and have a childlike penchant for sharing my excitement. My friends reminisce about the last time they were in this audience, a couple of them trading stories of when they took the Fringe For All stage themselves.

If you're reading this particular intro, then I've taken a moment to step outside my comfort zone. See, I write these intros, but then something might change, or priorities shift, or something more lovely strikes my fancy, and I start over. It means I'm generally ready for anything, and always pressed tightly up against a deadline. It's kinda sexy.

I was going to start this off by saying that this wasn’t my first Porchfest, and cast myself as some sort of veteran of the annual NDG DIY music festival trying to see it through fresh eyes. But after attending both days of Porchfest NDG this past weekend, I realized that this was my first full Porchfest experience.

Last weekend, as I wandered around NDG covering Porchfest (my report will be up tomorrow), I noticed election signs up. It took me a minute, but then I remembered that there was a Federal byelection in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce–Westmount riding scheduled for June 19th.

You can't get what you don't ask for. Well, you can, but it would be an improbable flukish thing, akin to winning a prize without entering the contest.

Living in a climate of extremes, the winter months test our resolve. So many days, upon leaving home before the sunrise, I'm reminded that without modern amenities, the weather would kill me. It would kill every one of us.

As I arrived at Girouard Park in NDG, I already felt a bit overdressed. It was a beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon in early May, something that doesn’t happen every year. It felt appropriate that I was meeting Aurora Robinson and Sarah Ring, the two founders and current organizers of Porchfest NDG, an event that benefitted from unseasonable warmth like this for its very first edition in 2015. This bit of good fortune was not lost on the pair, though they decided to play it safer with future iterations.